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Close Read: The Madden War

Is John Madden all that’s standing between us and Al Qaeda? The Times reports that there are so many drones flying so many routes over Afghanistan and Iraq that the military is “awash in data.” So military officials are “turning to the television industry” to learn how to handle it:

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

So you can’t watch a football game, or run a war, without computerized graphic effects? Admittedly, there is sometimes a half-second, when you are watching a game in a stadium, when you find yourself looking for the yellow first-down line that’s actually only on television. Perhaps they can make the Green Zone green, like when they turn the Red Zone red. But back to the war, or, rather, back to the stadium:

Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

Not what you’d call a hardship assignment.

In 2009, according to the Times, the military filmed what would add up to twenty-four years worth of video if watched back-to-back. In an optimistic mood, one can half imagine a distant future in which all that footage might be useful to Afghans themselves in non-military ways—answering questions about agriculture or, in some even more far-flung time, about their culture and history, in the way that nineteenth-century census records and Revolutionary War pay stubs are exciting for amateur genealogists. But that is depressingly irrelevant at the moment. Really, the problem isn’t a surfeit or shortage of images, but how we read them. A lieutenant colonel told the Times,

You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a weapon.

“Accountable” is the crucial word there. Drones are not just eyes; they fire missiles and summon troops. Civilians have been killed because of what we think a drone has seen, something that has made Afghans angrier than we would like to admit. (Jane Mayer has written about some of the ethical issues related to the use of drones.) Eight Afghans were killed Tuesday in what sounds like an anti-American riot in Helmand province, prompted by rumors about the killing of civilians. And the Washington Post had a story today about how we are stepping up the use of drone strikes in Afghanistan, despite General McChrystal’s talk about being more cautious with them. The Post story mentions a strike in which

11 of the 13 people killed were confirmed Taliban members, and the other two were known associates.

That sounds more solid than the drone strike a few months ago, also supposedly based on drone video and involving German NATO forces, that killed some seventy villagers (and by some accounts more) who’d assembled to collect fuel from a disabled tanker truck the Taliban had hijacked. But still—what counts as an “associate?” A cousin, a wife, a housecleaner? The strike was part of a larger operation in which, a Marine officer told the Post, the military relied on the element of surprise:

“We caught them sleeping,” he said. “We caught them with their pants down.”

He meant that figuratively, but still—who might, so to speak, have been sleeping in the next bed?

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.